Erik Wilde on Services and APIs

Wednesday, November 28, 2007

Google's My Location

today, Google introduced Google Maps with My Location, a feature for mobile devices that indicates the current location of the device in Google maps; as exact location for GPS-enabled devices, and as large circle for devices without GPS. for those devices, the information about the cell phone towers contacted by the mobile phone is used.

the web page sports a little video about the new feature, and the video even has a how does that work? part, the only problem is that this part does not describe how it works. that's too bad, because it would be really interesting to know.

the new feature does not work on all devices (not on the iPhone, for example), Google claims to support most web-enabled mobile phones, including Java, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, and Nokia/Symbian devices.

since it seems to work on browser-based devices, my guess is that it only works for those devices which have some scripting support for getting the cell phone tower id, which can then be sent to Google, and they map it to a location. that would only work if scripts can get that information, which would be pretty weird, privacy-wise. but is there any other way, if we look at browser-based implementations? what am i missing here? GPS access from J2ME uses JSR-179, but how does the tower id work? JSR-179 as well or something else in the J2ME optional packages?

no matter how it works, it certainly is not working on the iPhone, which has its own built-in mapping application (which is using Google maps data). hopefully, apple will include this new feature of Google maps in the next revision of the iPhone software. and while you're at it, could i please also get access to My Maps? thanks!